Las Vegas: Sin City or Family Resorts?
             To most people, Las Vegas is synonymous with gambling and glitter; a slightly, pleasingly sinful fairyland for adults where they can watch the most entertaining performers and biggest names in show business in between bouts and playing games of chance that everyone knows favor the house. Locals call Las Vegas "Fun City" or "The Entertainment Capital of the World". All I know is that this place is a place of lights and really big signs Just about everyone knows the desert gaming Mecca for lustier, grubbier pursuits that have earned it a worldwide reputation as "Sin City".
             Las Vegas is really about gambling, and the offshoot business attracted by the 24/7 preoccupation with gaming like loan sharking, prostitution, pawnshops, and those wonderful tiny little marriage chapels. Gamblers, at least non-professionals, tend to be impulsive people who are obsessed with chance and do things on the spur of the moment. Other Cities may talk of local heroes like former Presidents, generals, baseball players, or ice skating queens. In Las Vegas, hall-of-famers whose names are passed around blackjack tables, roulette wheels and keno parlors are more likely to be like pokers greatest Amarillo Slim, Tom McEvoy, or Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal, former sports gamblers.
             Las Vegas didn't really begin coming into it's own, as a modern day international tourist center and gaming until a good looking, vicious hoodlum who grew up in Brooklyn named Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel. He was co-founder of Murder, Incorporated, and came to Las Vegas planning to build huge casinos. Siegel was the mob's glamour boy, who could charm Hollywood beauties with one look. His scams brought him nowhere but dead.
             Since Siegel's time, Las Vegas has made many gangsters, gamblers, entertainers and cunning entrepreneurs incredibly powerful and rich. People like Ted Binion sta...